The Lydia McGrew Podcast

Unnecessary details: The raincoat at Civitella

Unnecessary details provide a commonsense clue to truthfulness. See how this works in the testimony of a witness to the horrific Civitella massacre, which took place in 1944. We also find unnecessary details in the Gospels. "The Witnesses of Civitella," translation of testimonies, found here:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1535685X.1991.11015699Thanks to Luuk Van de Weghe for drawing my attention to this article in his book _Living Footnotes in the Gospel of Luke. https://www.amazon.com/Living-Footnotes-Gospel-Luke-Eyewitness/dp/B0CH23XGNWThumbnail, Civitella photo creative commons license: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Civitella_in_Val_di_Chiana,_piazza_principale.jpg

A very very unnecessary detail: "She was Estonian"

Two years ago I discussed Dirk Bogarde's visit to Bergen Belsen, his biographer's doubts, and the unexpected confirmation from an independent source. Go here to watch that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW1nLyn70ZE&t=922sI've been revisiting that topic recently in my research, and I was struck by an unnecessary detail in one of Bogarde's interviews that all by itself is noteworthy evidence for the credibility of his story. Discussing it gives me an opportunity to talk a bit more about what unnecessary details really are.Here is Bogarde's interview:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QaNCbig82Q

The grass is only sometimes greener!

Have you heard this critique of the "green grass" undesigned coincidence between John 6:4 and Mark 6:39? Here's how it goes: "The green grass around the time of Passover doesn't help to confirm the reliability of John and Mark, because there are times other than Passover when the grass is green in the Holy Land." But we aren't saying that the green grass *predicts* that it's happening around Passover, only that "green grass" and "around Passover" are sufficiently positively relevant to each other that the two accounts confirm each other. Since there is not a large quantity of green grass in Galilee for most of the year, the point stands.Here is an Israeli, with certainly no axe to grind to confirm the Christian Gospels, talking about the "few precious months" of greenness in the Holy Land.Come to think of it, this is a sort of undesigned coincidence in and of itself!https://www.israeltoday.co.il/read/a-hebrew-lesson-and-how-the-grass-is-sometimes-greener/

Bayes, Skeptics, and the Resurrection 9

Here Than and I talk about two pieces of mathematical malpractice in Blais and Paulogia's video on Bayes' Theorem and the resurrection. Blais tried to give the impression that Than made a mistake by his in-principle argument that testimony can (in principle) overcome even a very low prior. Blais implied that Than somehow neglected to admit that this "only holds when" the number of testimonies "approaches infinity." This is total baloney. The use of "goes to infinity" in what Than gives in his blog post is just a way of saying that there is no upper bound on how strong the evidence can get (in principle). It's a theorem. It is completely incorrect to say that somehow this "only holds if the number of testimonies approaches infinity." Second, Blais used a completely inapplicable type of statistical context to say that one would have to have at least 30 independent testimonies in order for Than's point to "kick in." Part of the reason that Than and I did these six hours of video together is because these sorts of misleading statements by someone with Blais's credentials can throw people. Therefore, they need to be addressed. Here once again is Than's blog post:https://www.inspiringphilosophy.com/blog/paulogiaits-time-to-stopHere is the Blais/Paulogia video that we are responding to:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6QenX4Oo78Professional articles by Lydia McGrew on dependence and independence. “Evidential Diversity and the Negation of H: A Probabilistic Account of the Value of Varied Evidence,” Ergo 3:10 (2016), available here: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ergo/12405314.0003.010?view=text;rgn=main“Bayes Factors All the Way: Toward a New View of Coherence and Truth,” Theoria (2016) 82:329-350. DOI 10.1111/theo.12102. Accepted manuscript version archived here. https://lydiamcgrew.com/wp-content/uploads/BayesFactorsAlltheWayaccepted.pdf“Accounting for Dependence: Relative Consilience as a Correction Factor in Cumulative Case Arguments,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy. 95:3 (2017), 560-572, DOI 10.1080/00048402.2016.1219753. Accepted manuscript version archived here. https://lydiamcgrew.com/wp-content/uploads/Correctionfactoraccepted.pdf“The World, the Deceiver, and The Face in the Frost,” Quaestiones Disputatae, 7:2 (2017, volume appeared in print fall, 2018), 112-146. Draft version archived by permission here. https://lydiamcgrew.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Problemoftheexternalworldrevised.pdf“Confirmation, Coincidence, and Contradiction,” Synthese, 2021, Online First 3/14/21, DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03102-x. Author’s Accepted Manuscript archived by permission here. https://lydiamcgrew.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/ConfirmationCoincidenceandContradiction.pdfThumbnail "Malpractice" by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images, used under Creative CommonsThanks to  @TestifyApologetics  [https://studio.youtube.com/channel/UCadiEsTZ0hNxs5OxwGiyELQ] for helping to get these videos with Than edited and up.

Bayes, Skeptics, and the Resurrection 8

Than and I get into the much-vaunted issue of the prior improbability of miracles. Is it really true that a miracle has such a low prior probability that no testimony can overcome it? Is it really true that one would have to throw out one's knowledge of science and the laws of nature in order to believe that a miracle occurred? Is it true that one would have to be able, on theism alone, to predict that God would perform a particular miracle in order to have reason to believe that a miracle occurred?We refute these misconceptions using detailed discussions of probability and the nature of miracles. Miracles, to be signs, need to have a backdrop of non-miraculous events so that they stand out. Than is even more inclined than I am to think that modern miracles occur, and yet that doesn't stop us from seeing the probabilistic modeling in a similar way.Here again is Than's blog post on these topics:https://www.inspiringphilosophy.com/blog/paulogiaits-time-to-stopHere is the Blais/Paulogia video that we are responding to:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6QenX4Oo78Here is just one of my articles on why we don't have to predict that God will perform a miracle in order to conclude that he has done so in the light of specific evidence:https://jat-ojs-baylor.tdl.org/jat/index.php/jat/article/view/201